Getting right into it tonight–I’ve taken on some customer service duties here at BP, and Jonah and Ryan will kill me if this gets any later! OK, honestly, I need to watch the last half of Survivor on TiVo. (BTW, if anyone has any experience with wireless home networks, please drop me an email and tell me how tough it would be to set one up linking my computer, TiVo, and the Gateway laptop I’m dreaming of. Maybe if I keep saying Gateway here and on the radio, I’ll get product.)
On March 4th, UTK included a reference to another injury analyst that should not have made it into publication. The statement was made with the intention of showing the genesis of my column, and not to disparage the ability or integrity of anyone else in the field, and I sincerely apologize for the remarks in question. Furthermore, let me go on the record and state that I have the utmost respect for the contributions and integrity of others in the field whose work inspired me in the first place.
What happens when a mild-mannered columnist gets involved with a group of
fire-breathing fantasy baseball experts? Confusion, puzzlement, and Alex
Gonzalez for $7. Joe Sheehan reports from the Rotowire Staff League fantasy
auction.
Six years ago, in Baseball Prospectus 1997, I wrote an article on the subject of “pitching to the score.” After some careful research, I concluded that there was no evidence that any pitcher in recent times had demonstrated a clear ability to win or lose games that was not based on how many runs they allowed in the context they were pitching. In that article, I primarily focused on those pitchers who had been labeled “winners” in recent years because they often sported excellent won-loss records despite mediocre ERAs. I looked at Jack Morris, Dwight Gooden, Jack McDowell, Dave Stewart, Dave Stieb, Jose DeLeon, Catfish Hunter, and Sandy Koufax, and found that none of them demonstrated any pattern of winning more games than one would expect from their runs allowed totals.
Felipe Alou and his ill-founded love for Marquis Grissom. Dusty Baker and his ill-founded love for Eric Karros. Bob Brenly and his ill-founded love for Matt Mantei. Special guest appearances by Nigel Wilson, Chris Tremie and Sherman Obando. Plus Joe needs your roto help.
Fernando Vina: Buff Bagwell impersonator or innocent second base collision victim? Roy Oswalt: Cy Young candidate or huge injury risk? And your jumble word of the day is IDKCYA.
There are signs that teams “get it.” I don’t think it’s any secret that the Blue Jays are one of the teams that get it. Sprung from the brain of the Athletics like Athena, the front office put together by J.P. Ricciardi can compete with the braintrust of any team. Despite revenue problems, hamstrung by contracts written in a bygone era, and having to play in the same division as the Red Sox and Yankees, the Blue Jays definitely “get it” and are headed for success.
Do day games really set the Cubs up for failure? To answer the question, I consulted Retrosheet game logs for each game played from 1997 to 2001 (Retrosheet doesn’t have the 2002 data ready just yet). The first series of numbers I ran looked at every team except for the Cubs, with data broken down between day and night games, as well as various permutations on what the team’s schedule had been like on the previous day (afternoon game on the road, and so forth). In the table below, I’ve provided the home team’s winning percentage based on each condition.
Chris Kahrl takes his biweekly look at even the most obscure transactions, detailing what impact they have on both player and team alike. In this issue: the Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, Montreal Expos, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
Thanks for all the feedback from yesterday’s story. Two topics are worthy of discussion before we get into the injuries. First, the Astros THR came out and many of you disagree with my ‘out on a limb’ red light that I dropped on Roy Oswalt. I thought I had explained my gut feel enough, but it didn’t appear to do the trick. Some of Oswalt is gut, but most of it was the analysis of his motion, and the problems the injury problems Astros pitchers have had lately.
In the end, remember that a red light simply means that someone has some indicators of injury, and that you should really consider all the facts–not just injury, but history, projections, and other knowledge about the player–when analyzing his prospects for the upcoming season. Injury analysis, at some level, is actually about economics. While I’m no Doug Pappas, bear with me for a moment. If a team pays a player like Oswalt or Pedro Martinez or Kevin Brown, that player may come up lame and not produce, leaving the team with fewer resources and lesser players to try and fill the roster spots. Sometimes the risk is worth the possible reward, but not being conscious of the risk and not hedging it will buy that team a non-refundable ticket to Lastplaceville.
For the past seven years, I’ve surveyed the members of the Society For American Baseball Research’s Business of Baseball Committee about issues relating to baseball labor and economics, publishing the results and a cross-section of the comments in the winter issue of the Committee’s quarterly newsletter. With a new CBA in place and the Expos still in limbo, I decided to survey my fellow Prospectus writers, too. Unlike the usual Prospectus roundtable, no one saw or commented on anyone else’s answers.
BP writers who responded to the survey included Jeffrey Bower, Will Carroll, Gary Huckabay, Rany Jazayerli, Jonah Keri, Doug Pappas, Joe Sheehan, Nate Silver and Derek Zumsteg. As you’ll see, our views are far from monolithic.
I don’t listen to a lot of sports radio, primarily because there isn’t enough
baseball content on it to keep me interested, and what little there is isn’t
particularly insightful. Most of my listening tends to come in the morning,
with the radio on as background noise accompanying a shower.
Yesterday, sometime between soap and shampoo, I heard a promo for the
Angels/Brewers game on the local ESPN Radio affiliate. The game didn’t mean
much to me, but the promised interview with Bud Selig certainly did. I was
eager to hear what Selig, long the game’s worst poormouther, would be saying
seven months after helping to negotiate a Collective Bargaining Agreement that
is the most favorable to ownership since 1975.
The problem with writing about a healthy team is not having enough to say, yet still missing the inevitable injuries the team will have. Over the course of a long season, players break down, have accidents, run into walls, dive headfirst into bases, swing too hard, iron their shirts, trim the hedges, and an infinite number of other products of randomness and chaos. Add to that the infallible fallibility of your humble writer, and hopefully I keep the signal-to-noise ratio tolerable.
The greatest change in baseball thought over the past 20 years has been the shift of focus from one offensive statistic (number of hits / number of times to plate that did not result in a walk) to a better one (number of times reached base / number of times at the plate). Granted, I realize that I’m omitting sacrifice flies and catcher interferences there, but that’s the essence of batting average and on-base percentage. If you only knew on-base percentage, you’d do pretty well comparing players.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this with fielding statistics–a fact that results in a disagreement between our eyes, instincts, and what we read. I’ve been trying to educate myself on fielding statistics for the last couple years, and I want to admit up front that I have not been able to reconcile them with my own evaluation. When I see Mike Cameron rated as a slightly above-average center fielder last year, I roll my eyes, because I have in my head a mental image of how far he can go to get a ball–a massive expanse few visiting outfielders can cover. The issue, though, is that it’s not an accurate picture or particularly useful in evaluation.
The second most frequent question I get after “What the [bleep] is wrong with Nick Johnson?” is “How do you do what you do?” My friend Robert Herzog called me on my radio show last year and really grilled me. He’s a friend now, but it was really an annoying question. At the time, my answer was “lots of phone calls and a lot of perseverance.” True, yes, but not really the key to it.
Becoming a baseball injury analyst was something of a wonderful accident of luck and timing. Under The Knife started as my answer to another injury analyst who gave incorrect information and answered a question with, “What do you expect for a hundred bucks?” I’d had just enough coffee in me that day to think that I could do better.
“Don’t call it a comeback. I been here for years.”
–LL Cool J
I was on the phone with Rany Jazayerli last week, discussing the launch of
Baseball Prospectus Premium.
He asked me what I planned to write for my
first column back, and I told him I hadn’t given it much thought. With so many
people getting the newsletter as part of their BP Premium sign-up, not to
mention the fact that it’s been just eight months or so since I last wrote for
BP, I didn’t think it would be necessary to do what the cinema folks call an
“establishing shot.” Rany made good points, however, so to the shock of no one
who knows me, I’ll talk a little about myself.
The Devil Rays look to take a page from the World Champion Angels’ playbook. Lou Piniella and Art Howe like their new shortstops. Barry Bonds, on how walking is harder than hitting.